This generation of games are privileged with a resource of technology that endows the body with powerfully visceral performance capacities. Physic engines bestow the game body with a motivation that is emulative of corporal functions in real-world spaces. Whilst the motivations of physics applications are conceptually intent toward realism their impact on the body is often rendered hyperbolic in a sign system that demands accentuation for its communication. This paper will look at the manifestation of moments of awesome physics, defiant moments of physics and the engine itself that produce exceptional scenarios that operate against the realistic potentials of the technologies as well as conventional forces of physics.
In previous work I have discussed how the sensation emitted by the fragged body as assisted by the physics engine, bestowed with movement emulations and simulations that resonate with the plausibility of physical pliability. This inquiry continues with a physics fascination but instead is focused toward mechanics and a production of style that is contrary not necessarily to sensation but to physical rule. This study intends to theorize moments of express physical alterity, moments of such divergence as to provoke awe in their reception. This is a study of physics expression that make me say what? And then wow!
With respect to my research this investigation of awesome physics concentrates on its manifestation in the violent throws of the frag and its spontaneous reanimations of dead game bodies. The physics agent both kills the body and resurrects it. In the simplest terms the physics involved with awesome physics refers doubly to the operation of physical sciences and their impact on the physical body. Awesome physics are involved in a cause and effect scale that is inconsistent, disproportionate or entirely elusive, producing moments of physical impossibility. Looking at respective moments that embody this action I will determine how the bizarre renderings of physicality and physics become fantastic and how their experience might be pleasurable.
The tenants of awesome physics are not all together unfamiliar to our visual media and consumption. This fantastic phenomena predates the videogame form, its most explicit antecedent residing in the eccentric traditions of classical animation. In terms of physicality and the subversion of universal certainties its most notable formulation is the persistence of illogical return. That is the evasion of death performed as imperviousness or resurrection. This evasion in itself is not explicitly awesome physics though the linear actions of it total performance exhibit a fluctuation in plausible effect, rather it is the specifics of each evasion that purport awesome properties.
The resistance of the cartoon body is however subject to a certain logic. Referring to some of the most complex theories of the workings of the Universe, quantum mechanics - the Universe on the smallest scale – Stephen R Gould[i] investigates the applicability of bizarre universal behaviours to cartoon physics. Observing the contrariness of the laws of the Universe he notes how the counter intuitive activities of Bugs Bunny might be explained by quantum tunnelling. Bugs has a talent for escape, finding himself in inescapable situations he somehow defies the inevitability of detainment to pop-up in another location unexplained as though he were somehow able to pass through solid objects or manipulate them in some way. This inexplicable escape is the enactment of quantum tunnelling seeing that particles are able to pass through impenetrable materials. The behaviours associated with wave particle duality explain the resilience of animated bodies. Acting like ‘solitons’, particles that are able to ‘remember’ their shape after collision, the animated body exhibits physical retention after impacts. This is how Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Judge Doom is able to peel his flat carcass from the floor and pop back into shape after an encounter with a steamroller. Wile E. Coyote’s relationship to gravity might best be explained with the observational conditions of science. Wile E walking on air will only fall once he becomes aware of his situation, as though gravity were conditioned by his consciousness. Not unlike Schrödinger's possibly unhappy cat the nature of something, in this case physics is only certain upon its observation. And this analysis could continue…
Alan Cholodenko elaborates on cartoon behaviours claiming that the spectacular expression of these bodies belongs to a third order of the uncanny, what he terms the ‘cosmological uncanny’.
So despite the explicability of the apparently fantastic cartoon body it remains awesome as a rendering of the invisible conditions of the physical universe. These strange bodies are the visible performance of the quantum defamiliarizing the subjects in context permitting the resonance of exceptionality, though these bodies do not inherently belong to Freudian psyhoanalytics as will be discussed later.
The restraints of this paper do not permit a full and varied examination of the dissemination of awesome physics, instead I will conduct a comprehensive analysis of two categories, firstly addressing the glitch.
The very nature of the glitch is difference. It has never been rendered it has never gone through the processes of game design. It inhabits those rendered processes, lying dormant until it is provoked. The glitch is anomalous, and as visual a pure instance of spectacle. The accidental nature of the glitch is utterly chaotic; it is an error that manifests in an unpredictable form. The glitch disrupts the anticipation of effect in play by producing flawed and incompatible effect from cause. The particular way in which play organises cause-effect logic is completely disrupted by the glitch by making the scenario unplayable or interrupting successful play by spectacularly affective error in effect. Gameplay requires a certain degree of consistency to make it playable, especially in the programming of executable moves the glitch or error then prevents or disrupts that order. Yet the difference of the moment, of what the glitches does to the body, exalts its at the same time as total exceptionality.
The most common form of glitches that registers visually occurs in the collision programming that determines the solidity and playbility of a body or object. Its slippages appear as uncanny tunnellings in which the avatar body melds with or penetrates solid objects. Such errors may occur as benign but inexplicable instances where the avatar passes through supposedly solid objects unaffected as though they were apparitions.
This phenomena may also be observed in more fantastic forms. Oblivion notoriously holds this type of error. This effect is the result of a break in the Havoc physics engine and is achieved by moving a dead body under the arch of an open doorway. After closing the door the body becomes trapped inside it convulsing wildly. Another infamous glitch in the Oblivion engine causes fragged bodies to melt down, their weapons and armour still intact the player may then stretch portions of the melted form at liberty and to great lengths. This glitch is determined by the mode of the frag. Attacking a non-player character and casting the body with a paralysis enchantment before executing the frag will provoke the peculiar occurrence. It is a bizarre reaction to mixed instruction, the engine confused between the paralysis commands and the death that inhibits further behaviours, melts down taking the body with it in a chaotic conversion of conflicting applied physics.
Glitches often occur at the death moment because it is a change in state, or technically a change in programme prompted by player commands. The frag moment, the moment that signals character death and orders the end of their animation is particularly susceptible to fault as the glitch will attack the body unless that body is completely deprived of programme. This is why death glitches are rife in games that apply ragdoll physics post-mortem.
Mortal Kombat: Deception (2004)[i] features the series’ first ‘hara-kiri’ and ‘fatality’ moves. Hara-kiri from the Japanese refers to a noble seppuko, an honourable suicide of a warrior and is an in-game suicide combo executable when the opponent reaches frag stage signalled by the screen anchorage ‘finish him’. Executable under the same rules the fatal move produces a violent kill as appose to a knockout and like any combo is inalterable in its performance, it is exact. In double player mode, if both actions are performed simultaneously a glitch occurs.
The engine fails to negotiate a separation or hierarchy and the two moves are gruesomely, bizarrely combined. The character with the fatality play is pronounced winner and in the midst of their executing move is illogically struck by the hara-kiri specific to their opponent. This mingling of two sensible and recognisable actions, within the game context, is confused by the compounding. It is the irrational meld of two disparate moves producing impossible physical images of violence. The merging of two discrete acts confuses cause and effect often producing images with no rational affective agent, making the violent frag spectacular.
Splatter Physics
Whilst glitches are the awesome product of lapse in cause and effect logic producing obscurity, splatter physics reigns in absurdity. The splatter that I am talking about is the awesome sum of disproportionate effect, its excess sublimated by indulgence of effect. Bodies may be totally consumed by the gibs that spew from them or left to welter in inexplicable quantities of blood, limbs may be propelled out at phenomenal rates over impossible radius and all this is actioned as a reward system in the game scenario. Not only does the release of giblet effect progression but its very nature may be configured by cheat to gratify in obscene measures, acknowledged in Rise of the Triad with the blurb ‘ludicrous gibs’ to signify merit. This suggests that the gib sits within a base gratification model, as the visceral visual reward for the frag its disproportionate figuring might exalt the measure of success and along with it the pleasures of its manifest.
Looking at the splatter effects of Doom in ‘extreme gore’ mode the impossibilities of the gib are elucidated. The single frame transition from body to giblets is an extreme one as the mass of the body is replaced by inconceivable amounts of blood that gradually coat the landscape. The motion, trajectory and quantities of this spray overwhelm the diegesis producing what Christian McCrea terms ‘dimensional excess’. That is the disruption in the sense of layered dimensional order prompted by the force of the gushing hemal matter that is so vast and strong that damages not only the body but the laws that would act upon it and the dimensions that would confine it. These moments, rather then being divisive, are both explosive and consuming they implode sensible arrangements but expunge meaning that may be pleasurable.
Referring here to a meaning beyond the frag reward signification the meanings produced are the chaotic formations contrary to body logic. The kill that produces gibs or that breaks the body apart revealing ham bones works to disturb the body’s structure and to take it beyond conceivable limits. McCrea notes an appropriate correlation between physical violence and its effects claiming that violence is ‘semiophagous’ that ‘it devours and disrupts signs’. The excess of its force as exhibited in some games, or additioned with mods, produces the awesome effects of deviant signage or what Philip Brophy calls ‘possessed signifiers’ in which meaning is submissive to effect.
Like the exploding body for Brophy, the gib is an arbitrary configuration, ‘in that they are not manifestations of psychological impulses which await our individual identification through their implicity, but rather fictitious possibilities of an unqualified textuality awaiting our individual consumption of their absurdity’ (Brophy). While the immediacy of the absurd impact might twinge the ‘cosmological uncanny’ or creep with abject dissidence at the core the process and effects of explosion or eruption is all together more basic, more base and simply visceral. The effects of splatter physics, as effect and affect, are cathartic.
Explosion is the directing of concerns, fears, frustrations at the image of the body, causing it to splatter under force, impact, intensity and pressure. More so, it is the point of eruption, the instant of dematerialization, that serves as the dead-end-centre for the painful yet pleasurable build-up of everything being directed at the body – both material and symbolic. In bluntest terms, the photographic effect of the exploding body-part is not unlike a cum shot. (Brophy)
The exploding body is a release, a release from the forces of the engine, a release from the pressures of the sign and a release from the anxieties of the enemy presence. It is essentially the compounded pleasures of relief and in its excess awe.
Conclusions
Despite the multifarious modes of their manifestation the violence of the physical renditions of awesome physics remain alike, all in their unlikeness; in their spectacular rendering of physicality that registers in exceptionality. The reproducibility of fantastic actions in games and a players complicity in the performance of awesome physics alludes to a pleasure in chaos that is akin to the delights that the cinephile finds in paracinema. It is a joy found in the bad over the good, in the ridiculous over the sensible.
To briefly conclude I return to the contrary nature of the awesome incident facilitated by a technology formed of virtuous physical relation. Converse is it that the ragdoll and collision physics that imbibed the game body with forceful sense of realism should be the very things that break that relation apart, an opposition that Barbara Wegenstein eloquently observes with respect to mediated butchery, she states:
It is almost as if the medium could hold together the body, so that it can fall to pieces and be dispersed into the environment. (Wegenstein, 2006: 39)
1 comment:
next up: mega literature!!
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